Eating less meat and dairy - the sustainable 'diet'
This subject is all over the BBC news today but it's far from new; the serious media have been discussing it for years eg https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/dec/11/eat-less-meat-dairy-diet . So why did it take so long to become a mainstream concern? It's only because the UN's IPCC has taken the initiative that we're now being told this, as if it were somehow novel.
I've been eating like this since I was a broke student who'd grown up in a 'meat and two veg' home but then spent a semester living with a German-Jewish Quaker family who didn't eat meat at all but seemed to have much more interesting food than I'd been fed for the previous 18 years. They introduced me to 'Diet for a Small Planet', which discussed the science of balancing vegetable proteins at great length but. more usefully, then provided lots of recipes for putting that into practice.
The theory has been slightly debunked since - one doesn't have to eat the various types of protein at the same time to maximise the usable protein in one's diet, for instance - but the sustainable principle of feeding people grains and pulses, rather than growing vegetable crops to feed to animals and eating those, still holds good.
I've been eating like this since I was a broke student who'd grown up in a 'meat and two veg' home but then spent a semester living with a German-Jewish Quaker family who didn't eat meat at all but seemed to have much more interesting food than I'd been fed for the previous 18 years. They introduced me to 'Diet for a Small Planet', which discussed the science of balancing vegetable proteins at great length but. more usefully, then provided lots of recipes for putting that into practice.
The theory has been slightly debunked since - one doesn't have to eat the various types of protein at the same time to maximise the usable protein in one's diet, for instance - but the sustainable principle of feeding people grains and pulses, rather than growing vegetable crops to feed to animals and eating those, still holds good.
